Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was born in Nyack in New York to a middle-class family that encouraged
his artistic abilities.!
Hopper worked primarily in oil painting, he mastered the medium of etching, which
brought him more immediate success in sales.!
In 1933, Hopper held an exhibition at the museum of modern art, receiving critical
recognition.!
he was by then celebrated for his style , in which urban settings and entities are all
pervaded by a sense of silence and estrangement.!
his chosen locations are often vacant of human activity, and they frequently imply the
transitory nature of temporary life.!
At deserted gas stations, railroad tracks, and bridges, the idea of travel is fraught with
loneliness and mystery.!
Other scenes are inhabited only by a single pensive figure or by a pair of figures who
seem not to communicate with one another.!
These people are rarely represented in their own homes; instead, they pass time in the
temporary shelter of movie theaters, hotel rooms, or restaurants.!
In Hopper's most iconic painting, Nighthawks (1942), three customers and a waiter
inhabit the brightly lit interior of a city diner at night.!
They appear lost in their own weariness and private concerns.!
Hopper explained that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New Yorks
Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet."!
The diner has since been destroyed, but the image, with its carefully constructed
composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends any particular
location.!
The painting reveals three customers lost in their own private thoughts.!
The anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as remote from the viewer as
they are from one another.!
Although Hopper denied that he purposely infused any of his paintings with symbols of
isolation and emptiness, he acknowledged of Nighthawks that, "unconsciously,!
probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city."!
Hopper eliminated any reference to the diner's entrance. The!
viewer, drawn to the light shining from the interior, is shut out from the scene by a
seamless wedge of glass.!
He never lacked popular appeal, however, and by the time of his death in 1967, Hopper
had been reclaimed as a major influence by a new generation of American realist artists.!
Office in a Small City is a scene that could have taken place in any American town in the
mid- twentieth century.!
Hopper's explanation of this painting was: "My aim was to try to give the!
sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air, with the office furniture
which has a very definite meaning to me."!
The solitary office worker in this scene is isolated both physically and emotionally.!
There is no indication of his particular profession, as he sits in his shirtsleeves; he
appears, in fact, to be daydreaming rather than working.!
The postwar culture of American business is evident in the mass-produced office
furniture, the impersonal atmosphere of the office itself, and the man's!
detachment from his unseen coworkers.!
Despite the light and air afforded by his corner office, he appears trapped in place.!
He is framed by the office window, and his head is profiled against another window and
the wall of the!
